A former civilian firefighter who downloaded child pornography on his computer while working aboard Camp Lejeune pleaded guilty this week as part of a sweeping investigation that netted several arrests in Eastern North Carolina, federal prosecutors announced Friday.

Shane Michael Green, 39, will spend the next nine years in prison followed by 20 years of supervised release in a sentence handed down by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Malcolm J. Howard.

Green pleaded guilty in October of downloading child pornography. On Oct. 24, 2009, Green received a video of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct via file sharing, according to his June 2012 indictment.

The crime was discovered during a May 2011 investigation which led to an IP address aboard Camp Lejeune. NCIS tracked the IP address to a private network Green had been using to download child pornography using a peer to peer file sharing program.

Green is no longer employed by the fire department, according to base officials.

The N.C. State Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children assisted in the case which was prosecuted by Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Griffith.

The case was part of the Project Safe Childhood initiative, a national program aimed at effectively prosecuting criminals exploiting children. The program makes full use of all available law enforcement resources at every level and resulted in a series of successful prosecutions of sex offenders and producers of child pornography in the Eastern District of North Carolina.

“I am proud to announce this series of sentencing and guilty pleas,” U.S. Attorney Thomas G. Walker said in a press release.

He said the convictions help demonstrate that the safety of the children in the district is among his office’s highest priorities.

Other convictions included the discovery of tens of thousands of child porn images and videos in the home of a Havelock man previously convicted at court martial of child porn crimes; a man who had a private library in his Fort Bragg home with thousands of images of children being sexually exploited; a Wake County man who produced child porn with at least two children; and others.

“These predators victimized a child every time they shared or downloaded a picture or video of child pornography,” said Roger Coe, acting special agent in charge of the Charlotte Division of the FBI.

Walker said the difficult reality is that there are many more of cases yet to be adjudicated.

“Whether you are a producer, distributor, or collector of images and videos of children being sexually abused, you should understand that this kind of conduct is unjustifiable in any way,” Walker said. “We will not tolerate behavior that treats children as objects for sexual amusement.”

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Contact Daily News Senior Reporter Lindell Kay at 910-219-8455 or lindell.kay@jdnews.com. Follow him on Twitter and friend him on Facebook @ 1lindell.

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A former Camp Lejeune employee was sentenced this week to nine years in prison and 20 years of supervised release for child porn.

Shane Michael Greene, 39, was indicted on June 24, 2012. On Oct. 15, 2012, Green pleaded guilty to downloading child porngoraphy, according to information from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Green received a video of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, according to informtation from the Department of Justice. In May 2011, law enforcement detected an IP address that was sharing images of child pornography. The IP address was tracked to a private network aboard Camp Lejeune.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigated and found that Green had been downloading child pornography using a peer to peer file sharing program while employed as a civilian firefighter on the base.

The case was part of the Project Safe Childhood initiative, a program aimed at ensuring that criminals exploiting children are effectively prosecuted by making full use of all available law enforcement at every level.

The investigation was conudcted by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and Naval Criminal Investigative Service with assistance provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.